Color printers have become increasingly more commonplace with advances in printing technologies. High-quality color printers are readily commercially available in a variety of sizes and prices ranging from portable and desktop printers for use at home or at the office, to large commercial-grade printers. Traditionally, printers were, used primarily for printing text documents. Today, however, color printers are available and are routinely used to print complex images, such as digital photographs. Often it is difficult to distinguish color printed images from developed film photographs.
It is often desirable to deposit ink at the very edge of the paper (or other print medium), for example in Page Wide Array (PWA) printing. In order to do so, PWA printers continue to deposit ink during the printing process even as the edge of the print medium is moved out from under the print head, causing an overspray. Even if the printing operation does not print to the edge of the print medium, ink may still be ejected in between pages in order to maintain the ink nozzles by preventing ink from ring in the nozzles.
In either case, excess ink may buildup on the platen. If allowed to accumulate, ink residue may be smeared onto the print medium during subsequent print jobs.
PWA printers are also commonly equipped with a vacuum to maintain the print medium flat against the platen during the printing process. The vacuum is typically applied beneath the platen, and accordingly, the vacuum also forms an aerosol from the excess ink. In aerosol form, the ink residue may travel even deeper into the printer housing, contaminating other printer components. For example, ink may build up on the vacuum filter and thus increase the frequency with which the vacuum filter needs to be changed.